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Thursday, June 12, 2008

Somebody's Seen Bamboozled too Many Times?

According to Doll-maker Marcel Offermann, it is.From reading this article and this one, it seems like this guy's heart is in the right place, but damn where is his head?

I mean, the main problem with the doll is pretty obvious. It looks nothing like Barack Obama and everything like a blackface toy straight out the early part of the 20th Century. The face is generic. The skin-tone is all wrong. *sighs, removes his glasses and massages his corneas* We're in for a lot of shit like this, aren't we?

The doll-maker admits the doll could be better and that this is his first black doll.

Offermann - a “personal fan” of Obama - explained that he was forced to adapt an off-the-shelf black doll's head for his tribute to the presidential hopeful - his first attempt at making a black doll.

He did, however, lighten the standard skin colour of the doll's head.

“We tried to make it even lighter so that it would look more like Obama, but then it didn't look so good,” he was quoted as saying. “So we said, let's stick with this skin tone.”

The expert toymaker admitted the physical resemblance to Obama could have been closer. He said while 90 per cent of the feedback so far was positive, “10 per cent of people said the doll doesn't look like Obama.

“The doll works more on a symbolic level. It's a symbiosis of the clothing and the fact that it's a black doll.”

It didn't look right with lighter skin? I can't imagine it looking worse. Only 10 percent of the people who gave him feedback noted that it doesn't look like Obama? Perhaps the other 90 percent just think that all black people look the same.

The biggest issue is one of poor craftsmanship. Check out his Pope Benedict XVI doll.